I - 9/11 Through the Eyes of an American Skeptic

Chapter I

9-11 Through the Eyes of an American Skeptic

As a journalist with an independent weekly newspaper based in Washington, D.C., I became caught up in the events of 9-11 from the minute it happened and was able to write freely about the terror attacks that were exploited to start the pre-planned War on Terror.

From my position as a skeptic of the unproven official version, I have examined the facts and evidence since the day it happened and have concluded that the U.S. government and controlled media have engaged in a conspiracy to deceive the world about what really happened on that terrible day.

The Dream

The early morning hours of September 11, 2001 found me with my family driving through New York City en route to Washington, D.C. after a weekend trip to Stowe, Vermont. We had visited the Trapp family lodge and gotten a late start from Stowe on Monday afternoon. By the time we reached New York City, our two small children were fast asleep in the back seat of our rented Buick.

Because the hotels were all full or outrageously expensive, I was left with no choice but to continue driving down the highway when I should have been sleeping. To keep me awake as I drove through New York City, my wife Helje told me about a vivid dream she had had a week earlier, the night before we had left our home near Chicago.

I had heard parts of Helje's strange dream when she had first told it to our children in the backseat of the car as we set out across Indiana for Washington, D.C. Now, to help keep me awake on the busy highways of New York City, she told me her dream from the week before.

In the dream we were driving toward a city with a skyline of densely packed skyscrapers when a large airplane flew right at our car and dove into the road about 50 meters in front of us. She turned and saw the plane emerge from the ground behind us and another plane coming at us from another angle. This was a strange dream in which she felt that our family had been under attack.

Helje's dream turned out to be an eerie and uncanny premonition of what was to happen in the skies of New York City less than eight hours later.

It was about 3 a.m. on September 11 when we finally found an affordable hotel room just inside the state of Maryland on Interstate 95. The kids woke up and jumped on the beds and then we all fell asleep about a half-hour later.

I woke up about 8:30 a.m. and went down to the lobby for a cup of coffee. The television was on in the breakfast area reporting that a plane had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. I grabbed some pastries and coffee and hurried back to the room and turned the television to the news channel.

The children and I went to get more donuts and coffee and were on our way back to the room when the second plane hit the South Tower. Helje had seen it happen live on television. We were shocked by the events and realized that America was under attack. I immediately called my office in Washington, D.C. and told my boss that kamikaze airplanes had hit the World Trade Center. He thought I was joking. I said I wouldn't joke about such a thing and told him to turn on the radio. I called the office again after the Pentagon was hit and said we would not be coming to Washington but were heading home to Chicago. Having no idea what would happen next, I thought it would be best to take the country roads and stay away from big cities.

We drove through rural Lancaster County past Amish farmers harvesting a very tall corn crop. I stopped and walked into the fields to ask some of the German-speaking farmers if they knew what had happened in New York City. They said they had not heard anything about it and carried on working with their horse-drawn harvester.

Our route from Pennsylvania to Chicago took us near the site in Shanksville where Flight 93 supposedly crashed, but I had no desire to go to the scene of the disaster. We stopped for lunch in a small town.

The diner was full of people but nobody was talking. The people sat quietly, as if mesmerized, listening to the news on the radio.

Indications of Israeli Involvement

We listened to the radio as we drove across Pennsylvania. It was a beautiful sunny day with a bright blue sky. About noon I heard a news report that five "Middle Eastern" men had been seen in New Jersey videotaping and celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center.

"They're probably Israelis," I told Helje. For millions of Americans who automatically associate "Middle Eastern" with Arab, this news report planted the idea in their minds that Arabs from the Middle East were behind the terror attacks on New York and Washington.

This line of thinking quickly became the media's only acceptable version of events and although it has still not been proven, it has become the official version of 9-11.

The first indication that the attack on the World Trade Center was an elaborate "false flag" operation came with the arrest of the five men on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River. These men, described as "Middle Eastern" in the first media reports, were later identified as Israelis. A false flag operation is a crime which is designed and carried out so that another party or nation is blamed.

That the five jubilant Middle Eastern men, who had photographed themselves smiling and celebrating with the burning World Trade Center in the background, were indeed Israelis (namely Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Omer Marmari, and Yaron Schmuel) and that two of them were known to U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies as agents of Israeli intelligence, was ignored by the mass media.

The men had been observed taking video or photos of themselves with the World Trade Center burning in the background. Sivan Kurzberg told the police that the men had been driving in their van in the immediate vicinity of the towers that morning. He was photographed flicking a lighter with the burning towers behind him.

A woman who had observed the jubilant Israelis said she was struck by the expressions on the men's faces. "They were like happy, you know," she said. "They didn't look shocked to me. I thought it was very strange."

When they were arrested, Sivan, the driver of the van, told the police, "We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem."

The story of the five men celebrating the destruction of the Twin Towers was dropped from the national news when it became known that they were not Arabs or Muslims from the Middle East, but Jews from Israel.

The noteworthy fact that these men, who clearly had prior knowledge of the attacks, were in fact Israelis, and that they had been arrested at gunpoint with box cutter knives, multiple passports, and thousands of dollars in cash in a van that tested positive for explosives was only reported by Paolo Lima in a local New Jersey newspaper, the Bergen Record, the following day.

This important and timely information, however, was completely ignored by the New York Times and the other national mass media outlets based across the river in New York City.

I discussed the pertinent details with Lima by phone, and this important and suppressed story became the subject of my first article about 9-11. I realized then, during the first week after 9-11, that the mainstream news media was ignoring and covering up important information and evidence about the terrorist attacks.

There would be, for example, no reporting in the mainstream media of Israeli involvement or prior knowledge of the attacks. And this was just the beginning of the censorship the controlled media was to impose on the events of 9-11.

The possibility that these men could be Israeli intelligence agents involved in a spectacular "false flag" terror attack was discussed in my article that went to print in the American Free Press on September 20, 2001. It was the only newspaper in the United States where such thoughts could openly be expressed.

Months later, Forward, a well known New York-based Jewish newspaper, confirmed that Urban Moving Systems, the Weehawken, New Jersey-based "moving" company that the men worked for, was actually an Israeli intelligence front operation and that at least two of the men, evidently the Kurzberg brothers, were known agents of Mossad, Israel's military intelligence agency.

Dominic Suter, the Israeli "owner" of the company and a prime suspect, was somehow allowed to flee to Israel after the Federal Bureau of Investigation had initially interviewed him, but before they could interrogate him a second time. He has not been extradited to the United States since.

After being held for 10 weeks, the five Israelis were sent back to Israel on visa violations. Ellner, Marmari, and Schmuel appeared on an Israeli television show, without the Kurzberg brothers, in November 2001.

Three of the Israeli agents arrested on 9-11 appeared on Israeli television in November 2001 and admitted that their mission had been to document the 9-11 attacks.

"The fact of the matter is that we come from a country that experiences terror daily," Oded Ellner (center) said."Our purpose was to document the event."

One would think that such a revealing public admission by a suspect, claiming prior knowledge of the terror attack and saying that his purpose "was to document the event" would be extremely newsworthy information in the United States.

Sadly, this was not the case. Rather than discuss the evidence, the mainstream media has constructed and defended an unproven version of events in which the blame is assigned to nineteen Arabs with ties to Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaida.

Indications of Israeli involvement in 9-11 were conspicuous from the beginning. Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Israeli prime minister and leader of the right wing Likud Party, actually said that he viewed 9-11 as a positive development. On the day of the attacks, Netanyahu was interviewed by James Bennet of the New York Times:

Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, "It's very good." Then he edited himself: "Well, it's not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy."

Benjamin Netanyahu (right) and Ehud Olmert are Israeli politicians from the extreme right-wing Likud party, which grew out of the Zionist terror organization, the Irgun. Olmert, then mayor of Jerusalem, made a secret visit to New York City the day before the terror attacks. Asked what the attacks meant for U.S.-Israeli relations, Netanyahu said, "It's very good."

Netanyahu predicted that the attack would "strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror of so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror."

Prior knowledge of the 9-11 attacks clearly indicates complicity in the murder of some 3,000 people.

Journalists, like myself, who challenge the official version with evidence and facts are marginalized as "conspiracy nuts." I have been portrayed as an anti-Semitic writer by the leading media networks simply because I dare to investigate the evidence of Israeli involvement in the terror attacks.

The level of the personal attacks against me increased dramatically in August 2006, when a police assault by three unidentified heavily-armed men resulted in my right elbow being fractured and my being unjustifiably shocked with 50,000 volts from a police device known as a TASER. This outrageous and illegal assault occurred at my home in front of my wife and eight-year-old daughter.

I was taken to jail and subsequently charged by the police with resisting arrest and aggravated assault, both misdemeanor charges. In the Chicago system nearly everyone in such a situation is forced to plead guilty and accept the sentence meted out by the judge. I refused to plead guilty, however, and spent nearly one year trying to defend myself against the baseless charges and malicious prosecution. In early June 2007, I was found guilty of both misdemeanors after a seriously flawed four-day trial in which the police were allowed to destroy the video evidence and then openly lied on the stand. My expert witness and evidence were not allowed to be presented by the Cook County judge, Hyman Riebman, a Zionist Jew. Having seen that there was no way to obtain justice in the corrupt court system, I was compelled to leave Chicago with my family before the date of sentencing. It would have been irresponsible for me to allow this criminal system to cause more harm to me and my family than it already had.

Odigo Warnings

In the first days and weeks after 9-11, I paid very close attention to the large number of Israeli terror suspects arrested, which was more than two hundred by November 2001, and investigated the published reports that an Israeli instant text message service had been used to warn Israelis of the attacks in New York - hours before they occurred. Many Israelis were evidently forewarned of the attacks through an Israeli instant messaging service called Odigo. This story, which presents the clearest evidence of Israeli prior knowledge of the attacks, was reported only very briefly in the U.S. media – and then forgotten.

According to the published reports, Israel-based employees of Odigo reported having received warnings of an imminent attack at the World Trade Center hours before the first plane hit the north tower. Odigo, an Israeli-owned company, had its U.S. headquarters two blocks from the World Trade Center, but the forewarned Odigo employees did not pass the terror warning on to the authorities in New York, an act that would have saved thousands of lives.

Two weeks after 9-11, Alex Diamandis, Odigo's vice president, said, "The messages said something big was going to happen in a certain amount of time, and it did – almost to the minute." "It was possible that the attack warning was broadcast to other Odigo members, but the company has not received reports of other recipients of the message," Diamandis said. Four thousand Israelis were expected to have been working at the World Trade Center on 9-11, yet only one was reported to have died at the complex. Based on the Israeli government figure that 4,000 Israelis were expected to have been at the World Trade Center at the time of the attacks, it seems evident that many Israeli Odigo users got the message of warning.

Odigo, which offers real-time messaging, has a feature called "People Finder" which allows a user to send an instant message to a large group based on a common characteristic, such as Israeli nationality. "People Finder" allows Odigo users to search for online "buddies," with filters like Israeli nationality, while maintaining user privacy at all times. The message was probably sent in Hebrew. The Internet address of the sender of the warning was allegedly given to the FBI. Two months later it was reported that the FBI was still investigating the matter. Since then there have been no further media reports about the Odigo warning of 9/11.

These two news stories about the fake Israeli "movers" and the Odigo messages, which clearly indicated that some Israelis had very specific prior knowledge of the attacks, were published in American and Israeli newspapers shortly after 9-11. Had the recipients of these Odigo instant messages contacted the New York police department, thousands of lives could have been saved. The question that has not been asked is, why didn't they?

Cui Bono?

There were several early indicators that Israelis were involved in 9-11 and that it was a spectacular "false flag" terror attack designed to serve as a casus belli to drag the United States into the "War on Terror." Apart from the previously mentioned evidence of Israeli prior knowledge, there were also the amazingly insensitive comments of Netanyahu about 9-11 being "very good" in his view.

Netanyahu, it should be noted, is the author of several books which call for the western nations to engage in a global "War on Terror." Since 1986, Netanyahu has urged the United States and western democracies to take up arms against the enemies of Israel in the name of "fighting terrorism," which is the title of one of his books. The "terrorists" that Netanyahu wants the West to wage war on, however, all happen to be the people and states opposed to Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian land.

I approached the 9-11 investigation with a twenty-five year history of living in and following the events of the Middle East. After many years of traveling in Europe and the Middle East, I obtained a degree in History from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1992. My academic emphasis was on Palestine and Israel. After the first U.S. war against Iraq, which I was actively opposed to, I spent my final year of university researching the Soviet occupation of the newly liberated Baltic republics and completing my courses at the University of Bergen in Norway.

Fate brought me into the proximity of another mass disaster on the morning of September 28, 1994, when I arrived by ship in Sweden and learned that the Baltic ferry named Estonia had sunk during the night with 852 victims lost at sea. My wife's first husband, a famous Estonian singer named Urmas Alender, was among the missing. While it was abundantly clear that something much more explosive than a "monster wave" had sunk the ferry, the Swedish government and media pretended that natural forces had caused the catastrophe. In the process of investigating what happened in the ferry disaster, I came to realize that a modern "democratic" state, like Sweden, could actually be complicit in the cover-up of the mass murder of hundreds of its own citizens.

When in the year 2000, I began working as a journalist for the Washington-based Spotlight, later to become the American Free Press, I turned my attention to the mysterious 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of New York. I attended the final sessions of the government agency (NTSB) involved in investigating the "crash" of Flight 800 and was appalled at the obvious cover-up of the facts. I watched how three Jewish members of the board completely dominated the NTSB final sessions and how the testimonies of more than 100 eyewitnesses, who had testified to having seen a streaking object hitting the aircraft in flight, were categorically dismissed because, according to a young Jewish member of the board, based on the time of the observations, all of the witnesses must have been drunk and hallucinating. After the two-day presentation of the NTSB findings there was no press conference or session allowing for questions from the media or public. This was clearly another cover-up.

I had also studied the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty and seen how the U.S. government and military had covered up the truth of the Israeli military attack on the unarmed Navy vessel off the coast of Egypt in 1967. With this background I approached the events of 9-11. Well aware of the history of false-flag terror, the overwhelming Zionist influence in government and media, and dishonest official investigations into recent mass disasters, I was a natural skeptic from the start.

Evidence of Explosions Ignored

The administration of George W. Bush rushed the nation and its allies into war in Afghanistan within one month of the 9-11 attacks using the unsolved crime as the casus belli for an overt act of aggression that had been planned long before. The war against the government of Afghanistan, called Operation Enduring Freedom by the government and military, began on Oct. 7, 2001.

The week before the war began I wrote an article about the immense oil and gas reserves of the Caspian Basin and the new "Great Game" to gain control of these valuable energy resources. I also wrote several articles about the long-standing business and personal ties between George W. Bush and the Bin Laden family. One month after 9-11, I wrote about how the mass media was ignoring the large number of eyewitness accounts describing explosions at the World Trade Center before the collapse of the Twin Towers and Building 7.

"Despite reports from numerous eyewitnesses and experts, including news reporters on the scene, who heard or saw explosions immediately before the collapse of the World Trade Center, there has been a virtual silence in the mainstream media," I wrote in the article titled "Some Survivors Say 'Bombs Exploded Inside WTC.'"

"After the airplanes hit the World Trade Center there were some explosive devices inside the buildings that caused the towers to collapse," Van Romero, an explosives expert and former director of the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center at New Mexico Tech, told the Albuquerque Journal minutes after the collapses. The collapse of the structures resembled controlled implosions used to demolish old structures and was "too methodical to be a chance result of airplanes colliding with the structures," Romero said. Coming from a man who is an expert in the effects of explosives on structures, Romero's comments carried a lot of weight in my opinion.

"It would be difficult for something from the plane to trigger an event like that," Romero said. If explosions did cause the towers to collapse, "It could have been a relatively small amount of explosives placed in strategic points."

"One of the things terrorist events are noted for is a diversionary attack and secondary device," he said. Then suddenly, ten days after the attack, without any explanation, Romero did a complete about-face in his analysis of the collapse. "Certainly the fire is what caused the building to fail," he told the Albuquerque Journal on September 21.

A friend of mine from Brooklyn told me that he had been standing among a crowd of people on Church Street, about two blocks from the South Tower (WTC 2), when he saw "a number of brief light sources being emitted from inside the building between floors 10 and 15." He saw about six of these brief flashes, accompanied by "a crackling sound" immediately before the tower collapsed.

Even a veteran 51-year-old fire fighter, Louie Cacchioli, told People magazine that he had witnessed explosions in the South Tower: "I was taking firefighters up in the elevator to the 24th floor to get in position to evacuate workers. On the last trip up a bomb went off. We think there were bombs set in the building."

What is most peculiar about the eyewitness reports of explosions was that they were completely ignored by the mainstream news media, even when the reports came from their own reporters on the scene. Stephen Evans of the BBC, for example, was in the South Tower where he witnessed "a series of explosions" and felt a "big explosion, from much, much lower." Yet the BBC, like the rest of the mainstream media failed to investigate or even discuss the evidence of explosions in the towers.

How did the editors of the mass media networks in the United States and Britain make the decision not to discuss the evidence of explosions even when the information came from their own reporters on the scene? Eyewitness reports and images of explosions were broadcast only once and then swept under the carpet. It soon became quite clear that the mass media was censoring any discussion of the evidence of explosions in the World Trade Center.

Within a few weeks I realized that the media and government were working together to deceive the public about what really had happened on 9-11 and that there was a conspiracy to promote a false version of events in order to gain public support for a previously planned war policy in the Middle East. The mass media engaged in a comprehensive propaganda campaign to instill fear in the public. My family and I decided that it would be safer and more sane to live in Europe, so at the end of November, after the Thanksgiving holiday, we flew to Germany.

Destruction of Evidence

In Germany, I had the opportunity to interview Andreas von Bülow near Köln. Von Bülow, an author and former member of the Bundestag (the German parliament) served on the parliamentary commission which oversees the three branches of the German secret service. Von Bülow said he thought Israel's intelligence service, Mossad, was behind the 9-11 attacks. These attacks, he said, were carried out to turn public opinion against the Arabs and boost military and security spending.

"You don't get the higher echelons," von Bülow said, referring to the "architectural structure" which masterminds such terror attacks. At this level, he said, the organization doing the planning, such as Mossad, is primarily interested in affecting public opinion. The terrorists who actually commit the crimes are what von Bülow calls "the working level," such as the nineteen Arabs who allegedly hijacked the planes on September 11. "The working level is part of the deception," he said.

"Ninety-five percent of the work of the intelligence agencies around the world is deception and disinformation," he said, which is widely propagated in the mainstream media creating an accepted version of events. "Journalists don't even raise the simplest questions," he said. "Those who differ are labeled as crazy."

Eckehardt Werthebach, the former president of the Verfassungsschutz (a branch of German intelligence), told me that "the deathly precision" and "the magnitude of planning" behind the attacks would have needed "years of planning." Such a sophisticated operation, Werthebach said, required the "fixed frame" of a state intelligence organization, something not found in a "loose group" of terrorists. Both Werthebach and von Bülow said the lack of a complete "blue ribbon" investigation, with congressional hearings, into the events of September 11 was incomprehensible. These men made more sense to me than anyone in the U.S. government or media.

As incomprehensible as it might seem, the Bush administration delayed and avoided an official investigation for as long as possible – at least until all of the evidence was destroyed. The steel from the World Trade Center was quickly shipped to Asia where it was melted down. The evidence from the crime scene was being destroyed as quickly as possible. This was clearly criminal, yet the highest authorities in the U.S. government and the Department of Justice were allowing it to happen.

Molten Metal

I consider 9-11 to be an unsolved crime and have done what I can to investigate the crime using the available evidence. In the summer of 2002, for example, I wrote an article about the seismic data that showed unexplained spikes occurring at the beginning of each collapse.

In my research into the removal of the rubble, I learned from one of the contractors and a demolition expert that molten metal had been discovered at the bottom of the rubble pile in the lower basement levels. This molten metal was described to me as "molten steel" by Peter Tully, president of Tully Construction of Flushing, New York, and Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI) of Phoenix, Maryland.

The molten steel was found "three, four, and five weeks later, when the rubble was being removed," Loizeaux said. He said molten steel was also found at WTC 7, the 47-story building owned by Larry Silverstein, which collapsed mysteriously in the late afternoon. Loizeaux said, "If I were to bring the towers down, I would put explosives in the basement to get the weight of the building to help collapse the structure."

The molten metal found beneath the rubble was clearly important evidence that could explain how the towers were brought down. Because each tower was held up by 47 huge box core columns, there had to be an explanation for what caused these columns to fall. The official explanation that fires had caused the floor trusses to give way failed to explain what happened to the core columns. To explain the extremely quick collapse of the core columns, the seismic spikes and molten metal seemed to be very important clues.

Steven E. Jones, a professor of physics at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah, contacted me in the summer of 2005 and asked me what I had learned about the discovery of molten metal at the World Trade Center. I told Jones exactly what Peter Tully and Mark Loizeaux had said about the discovery of molten iron in the basements of the Twin Towers and Building 7. After studying the reports and photographs of molten metal, Jones had been able to obtain some fragments of the metal. He concluded that the fragments were primarily iron and possible evidence that Thermite had been used to demolish the buildings.

The author and Professor Steven E. Jones discuss the evidence of thermite in May 2006.

Encouraged by his research, I visited Professor Jones on the campus of Brigham Young University in the spring of 2006. From Provo, Utah, I then traveled by train to the University of California at Davis where I met with Professor Thomas A. Cahill, an expert on airborne particles. Dr. Cahill had conducted a study of the particles contained in the thin bluish smoke that rose from the rubble for nearly four months after 9-11. Cahill's air sampling began on October 2 and continued until late December 2001, when the last fires were finally extinguished.

Asked why it took so long to begin a scientific evaluation of the air contamination that accompanied the destruction of the World Trade Center, Dr. Cahill said he had assumed that there were scores of agencies and scientists monitoring the air quality in New York City after 9-11. "I assumed it was happening. I could not believe it was not," Cahill said. "The EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] did nothing."

Cahill's work revealed the presence of extremely small metallic aerosols in unprecedented amounts in the plumes coming from the burning WTC rubble. Most of the particles in these plumes were in the categories of ultra-fine and nano-particles: from 0.26 to 0.09 microns. The extraordinarily high level of ultra-fine aerosols was one of the most unusual aspects of the data, Cahill said. "Ultra-fine particles require extremely high temperatures," he said, "namely the boiling point of the metal."

Since the scientific data supports the theory that some form of Thermite was used to destroy the towers, the question is how it got onto the 81st floor of the south tower, where large amounts of molten metal were seen falling before the collapse?

Molten iron pours out of SouthTower about one minute before the tower disintegrated.

The official final report of the fires does not explain what was on the 81st floor, which seems odd because this is the floor, leased by Fuji Bank, into which the airplane crashed. A former employee of the bank came forward and told me that the bank had reinforced the floor in 1999 to support a very heavy load of computer back-up batteries. "The whole floor was batteries," he said, "huge battery-looking things." They were "all black" and "solid, very heavy" things, which had been brought in during the night. They had been put in place during the summer prior to 9-11, he said. But were they really batteries? "It's weird," he said. "They were never turned on."

So, what really was on the 81st floor of the South Tower? What was in these heavy "battery-looking things?" Were they batteries, or were they Thermite? And is it more than a coincidence that both planes flew directly into secure computer rooms in both towers and that both spectacular explosions showed evidence of Thermite-produced white smoke?

The Cover-up Continues

Despite the legal difficulties, slander, criticism, and other setbacks, I have continued to examine the evidence from 9-11 and ask the questions that demand to be answered. The wasted lives of the thousands of victims from the terror attacks and the illegal wars that have been waged in the name of 9-11 deserve to be honored with the truth, not a pack of lies pushed by the controlled media onto a gullible public.

It would be naïve and foolish for us to expect the truth from a government that has been shown to have repeatedly lied to the media and international community in order to accomplish its dubious goals. The truth of 9-11 will certainly not be given to us on a silver platter. It is something we will have to fight for.

Finis

This chapter was originally written in February 2007 for ZeitenSchrift, a Swiss magazine.

Benjamin Netanyahu quote from "Spilled Blood is Seen as Bond That Draws 2 Nations Closer," by James Bennet, New York Times, 12 September 2001